Re: How best to get Oracle to divulge "proprietary information"

From: "Dennis Williams" <oracledba.williams@xxxxxxxxx>

To: sacrophyte@xxxxxxxxx

Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 13:09:05 -0500

Charles,

As to the question of Oracle documenting its internal workings,
I certainly wish more documentation was available. However, several thoughts
spring to mind:

1. As was pointed out, this would allow other companies to incorporate some
good ideas. You never know when a big-pockets competitor will spring into
existence.
2. In sales situations this can be used against Oracle in at least two ways:
- A competitor claiming to be just as good as Oracle because they use
the same algorithm.
- A competitior claiming to be better than Oracle because of an
improved algorithm.
3. Someone utilizes the inner workings and then Oracle gets stuck supporting
them. This has happened to Microsoft a lot. For example, Microsoft's NT
operating system originally didn't support Windows/DOS compatibility (back
in the day when Windows sat on top of DOS). Then Microsoft decided to
implement a Windows emulator on NT. Then they ran several popular commercial
programs and found there was a lot of reliance on the internals of DOS. So
they then had to implement special code to say if the user is running Lotus
123, then implement specific behaviors.

That said, I believe several people have given classes on Oracle Internals.
If I'm recalling correctly, I think Oracle Education has even taught these.